


These Stars Are Yet Unfallen

by WinterSwallow



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Loss, fairy tale AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:16:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 18,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5962050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSwallow/pseuds/WinterSwallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”   ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest</p><p>Fairy Tale AU stuff. Prince Alan and his four brothers in the days surrounding their father's disappearance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Tale of the Sleeping Prince

Hey, your home work before you read this is to go track down CarryonStarKid’s life ruining fairytale AU story [A Son By Any Other Name](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5635141/chapters/12977176), at least the first act of which you should read before digging into this.

For extra credit also check out Prelude-in-Z's [My Wish is Your Command](http://tb5-heavenward.tumblr.com/post/136733751657/here-is-a-bit-of-fairytale-au-backstory-for) which isn't critical but which predates and complements this story and is awesome to boot.

I know, I know, you're thinking, Gee Swallow, why don't you set us a couple of essays while you're at it, but after all you're here looking for good stuff to read (or maybe you're looking for porn, in which case I can't help) so why wouldn't you wile away a few hours reading some awesome kick ass stuff. A prince's curse be upon you if you don't.

Also **warning** this story does deal with some mature-ish themes about grief and loss, so if that's not your bag, likely this isn't either.

\- Swallow, Feb 2016

 

* * *

_**I** _

_**The Tale of The Sleeping Prince** _

A prince lies sleeping on a mossy bank.

The bank is a magic place. White lilies and black irises grow even in the winter snows. On moonless nights the pixies gather there like glowing motes of dust. To sleep on the bank is to dream dreams of the past, the future, or your heart’s desire.  
  
The little boy knows this. He knows it because his mother told it to him and if his mother told him then it must be true. She would take him here walking sometimes and show him the lilies and the irises, and sing with a voice that would silence the birds.  
  
And now a prince lies sleeping on the mossy bank.

The prince is the little boy’s brother, which makes the little boy a prince too, though he doesn’t often _feel_ like a prince. Princes are supposed to have grand adventures, slay dragons, hunt trolls. Princes shouldn’t have to learn their letters or eat their greens or be made to come inside for a scalding hot bath when what they want to do is to stay out in the mud and play. And princes shouldn’t have to wander the halls alone wondering where everyone else has _gone_. But that is what the little prince is made to do.  
  
He knows his brother sometimes wonders if he is a true prince too, because sometimes he stares out the window when he should be attending his lessons, and his gaze is a little sad, a little wistful and the smallest prince just knows he is dreaming of dragons and trolls and adventures. Sometimes on a dark night, when the sea howls like a hungry wolf and the smallest prince is alone and _not frightened_ and calls out for his mother though he knows she will not come, he will hear a soft tread on the stair. Then the door will swing open and his oldest brother will be there with a lantern in his hand. He will put the lantern on the floor and sit on the end of his bed and with barely no prompting at all, will tell him stories of all the adventures they are going to have together, the exotic lands they are going to see, the maidens they are going to rescue.  
  
The smallest prince is not all that sure about the rescuing maidens part. But he likes all the other stuff.  
  
And when he drifts off to sleep, the lantern will still be burning and his brother will still be there, yawning as he tells of some vast treasure yet undiscovered or some terrible giant yet unslain.  
  
That’s why his brother is his favourite brother.  
  
“Did he tell you that?” asks his other brother as they eat sooty toast by the fire in the library. “Did Scott tell you he was your favourite brother?”  
  
The smallest prince licks strawberry jam off the heel of his hand and thinks this is an odd question. But then brothers sometimes ask odd questions.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Alan, are you telling fibs again?”  
  
Alan scrunches up his face and tries to think of the real and true answer to this question. “No. He didn’t tell me who is my favourite brother. I told me.” But then, of course, he sees what is wrong. “Don’t worry, John. You’re my favourite brother too. You’re allowed to have more than one.”  
  
And John’s face crinkles in that way of his that has become so rare and Alan beams because it has become so hard to get John to smile, so hard that they have made a game of it.  
  
Virgil will bring him an interesting fossil, or smooth stones from the shore or a sprig of fresh blackberries plucked from a briar and John’s smile will seem to sneak up on him, spreading from his eyes out, like ink through water.  
  
Gordon will traipse up the stairs, soaking wet and dripping mud, with jokes learned from the grooms and the hostlers. “Did you hear the one about the merchant who opened a stall to sell to gaolers? He soon ran out of stocks.” “Why couldn’t the nervous archer hit the target? Because his arrows were all in a quiver.”  
  
And John will frown or wince or roll his eyes and just when it seems the smile won’t come, it darts across his face like a flash of summer lightning. _“Gor-don.”_  
  
Only Scott will not play the game of making John smile. Over and over Alan asks him why, because it’s a good game, the making John smile game.  
  
But Scott just shakes his head. “You’re much better at that game than I am, Alan,” he says. “You should play.”  
  
And maybe Alan is, because John is smiling now and it’s like sunlight warming a stone. “Oh really? And how many are you allowed to have?”

Alan thinks on this for a moment. “Four. You’re allowed to have four. Three is too few and five is too many. Four is just right.”  
  
And so John nods okay and asks another question, “What were you doing out in the woods, anyway?” And that is a signal that it is safe for Alan to go on with his story.  
  
The prince had gone into the forest. He has done it to show that princes are brave. He’s not causing trouble. He's bee climbing trees to see if he could find the nesting swallows that Virgil talks about. But it is too cold and the wrong time of year and summer is a long way away, so all he finds are broken, empty nests lined with feathers and straw.  
  
That’s when he sees the man and the boy.  
  
That’s when he finds his brother lying asleep on a mossy bank.    
  
There’s blood on Scott’s knuckles and under his fingernails. His cloak is torn in two places, but his chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm.  
  
It feels queer being the one awake when Scott is asleep. Like the world has gone inside out and backwards. He tries to call his name, tries to shake him awake, but Scott doesn’t move or groan or try to bat him away, he just sleeps on.  
  
And the smallest prince thinks, _Magic._  
  
And he is a little excited because magic is the thing the best stories are made of, but also afraid because it is wrong _wrong_ that he calls his brother’s name and his brother doesn’t come.  
  
And it’s wrong _wrong_ too because of all the things he’s seen and doesn’t understand and if he thinks about it too long or too hard then the trees will grow taller, and the shadows darker, and familiar faces will grow strange and frightening and he will stop being a hero in a story and become just a scared little boy instead of a champion in a story.  
  
And what his brother needs now is a champion and Alan will not let his brother down.  
  
So he sits by Scott’s feet and rests his head upon the bank and tucks his knees into his chest.  
  
And guards his brother’s dreams.

 


	2. Ribbons & Old Paper

_**II** _

_**Ribbons & Old Paper** _

_“My library was Dukedom large enough”_

_\- The Tempest_

A log burns on a fire.

And cracks, spitting sparks, sending them up into the air like a flurry of pallid shooting stars.

Alan jumps, startled, his gaze ripped away from the fire to follow the eddies of swirling sparks as one by one they wink out.

John scrapes a fingernail along the hearth stone, supresses a sigh and knows, just knows that Alan has lost his place again.

“And then what happened?” he prompts.

Alan gives a slow blink, as if the firelight has dazzled him and says, “Oh.”

Often the problem with Alan’s stories is just how much he loves them, how much he is in a rush to get you share his emotional state. If it’s a joke he’ll think it’s so hilarious he’ll skip straight to the punchline without telling you the set up and when you don’t laugh he’ll backtrack, tell you why you should find it funny even as he tries to explain the story. If it’s an adventure story, he’ll tell you the bits he thinks are most exciting and forget to give you any sort of context at all.

But even by Alan’s usual standards this story is unfocused. It’s full of false starts and double starts, regressions, diversions and cul-de-sacs. It’s the story of an old soldier. No it’s not, it’s the story of an enchanted prince, no, now it’s the story of a sword. It’s got pixies in it, and magic and evil enchantresses and the Dread Pirate Roberts.

“You were saying something about a sleeping prince.” John’s pretty sure the prince in question is Scott, but you can never be quite sure with Alan.

Because sometimes Alan’s stories are the most fantastic fibs. Stories of magic carpets, phoenixes nesting in the kitchen gardens, and dragons that snatch him up and take him to their hoard only to let him go again in time for tea. Sometimes they’re just stories.

But sometimes they are more than that. Sometimes his stories are the only way he has of telling you something. Sometimes all the backtracks and fantastic creatures and crazy adventures are his way of working through things, and if you keep listening to the fairy tale you’ll find the truth at the centre, like the stone in the heart of a plum.

John has never been good at telling which is which. Gordon is better at it, unwinding Alan’s stories with a careful word or a joke until the truth is plain. Penny too, seems to know just how to talk to Alan and tease what he wants to say out of him. Penny can play with words the way Virgil can play on the harp.

He wishes she were here now. But summer is still months away.

“The sleeping prince? Right, I guess, um, yeah.” Alan picks a purple scab on the back of his knuckle. “I guess I could start there.”

“What was he doing sleeping in the woods?”

Alan shrugs.

“Was he lost?”

Alan shrugs again.

“Enchanted?”

“Maybe?” Alan licks his lips. “But he wasn’t sleeping, not always. Not at first.

Um…”

Despite himself, John’s eyes slide over Alan’s shoulder to the north corner of the room.  

There’s a new space on John’s wall, a new gap among the bookshelves. Eos had stamped her foot when they had done it, had pulled Virgil’s hair as he helped remove the bust of some particularly unloved ancestor, and had only stopped when Gordon had threatened to introduce her to the kitchen tabby. But with persistence between them they had managed to make enough space for him to work.

And now pinned to every inch of the once bare wall are maps and charts and lists of tides. In the centre is a giant map of the kingdom, shipping lanes and forest paths marked out in red string. On the shelves all around, stacked in neat, ribbon bound bundles, are piles of paper, blue ribbon for shipping manifests, yellow for military reports, green for the records kept by the town burghers of the traffic that passes through their gates, white for miscellaneous information that may yet prove useful, black for irrelevancies.

On the smaller maps there are red pins for likely sightings and blue pins for unlikely but possible and a single gold pin that sits on the edge ready to be used.

John would die rather than admit it, but he thinks he prefers a father missing to a father present. For the first time in as long as he can remember he has a purpose again. Find their father. Find out what happened to him. Every evening there are footfalls on the stairs, Gordon or Scott or Virgil with new information, new leads to track down. Every morning there are piles of new information to sift through. Suddenly he’s not the lonely prince in the tower, he’s useful and valued and needed.

And a father missing saves him the agony of a father’s visit.

Often he will come early in the morning, before the dawn breaks, or at night when the candles are burning low, and John can pretend to be asleep. Eos will stay out of sight and his father will sit stoking the embers of the fire for hours. But sometimes John will return from fetching a book from the stacks and his father will just be there, in the arm chair by the fire, and John will come and settle by the hearth, and he will feel the tickle of Eos, hiding beneath his collar, her light dimmed down low and he will be forced to make conversation.

And Father will ask if he has everything he needs and he will lie and say that he does and then lapse into silence. Then father will tell him some story from the furthest reaches of the kingdom, about some trade dispute or plague outbreak or some sortie with bandits and John will hate him a little for mocking him, for telling him about the things and places he’s never going to get to see. But perhaps his father deserves his revenge? Perhaps this is his way of punishing him for scarring the family bloodline? They will whisper for generations to come, surely, about the mad prince locked up in the tower.

Afterwards his father will get up and leave and not return for days, sometimes weeks. But he will always leave something behind. A new book maybe, or a basket of oranges.

At least he did. But that was before.

John would rather die than admit it, but he doesn’t miss his father.

He doesn’t miss the books, always on agriculture or alchemy or politics, because his father never bothered to learn his interests.

He doesn’t miss the smell of orange skin burning in the fire.

He wonders if that means there’s something wrong with him.

Maybe he can ask Papa that, if he ever finds him.

_When he finds him._

Because every day the system he’s building grows more robust. Because every day the patterns get clearer. If he can just learn how to read them, can interpret their subtle cues, they can’t but lead him to Papa.

If only he could get back to it now. That’s where he wants to be, soaking in a whirlpool of information and possibilities.

But Alan is staring at him with those wide blue eyes, wondering what’s wrong.  

They trouble him sometimes, those blue eyes. They are too much like Scott’s. Alan’s got so much Scott in him.

Why should that bother him? He’s his brother, after all. Brothers look alike.

But John doesn’t feel he has any Scott in him at all.

Sometimes he thinks Alan doesn’t have any John in him.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

He refocuses, because Alan’s still staring at him, still trying to tell him whatever it is, in his elliptical way, he’s been working up the courage to say.

He has to listen, because he’s not going to give Scott another chance to stand on the rug, all smug and superior and yelling at him. “You missed it. How could you? He might as well have told you outright, and you never even noticed. What is _wrong_ with you?”

And also because it’s Alan and because he’s already let him down once already.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m listening. Do you want to start again?”

“Yes please.”

John stokes the fire so they can make toast and they settle down on the rug together. “Tell me whatever you need to say.”

So Alan begins his story one more time.


	3. The Tale of the Old Soldier's Sword

An old soldier sits by a river bank and hones his sword upon a whetstone. 

The smallest prince rushes down the river bank to join him. He slips and slides and falls on his bum and lands right at the lip of the river and nearly plunges into the cold rushing waters except the man seizes him and pulls him back.

“Alan,” says his father. “What are you doing here?”

His father is a king and he is all the things a king should be. He is tall and wise and kind and brave and has big strong hands that are perfect not just for kinging but for holding a sword or a horse’s reins, or for dragging little princes out of rivers.

“What,” he says, “Did you do to your governess?”

“I didn’t do anything to Governess,” Alan says, answering honestly. 

But his father is too clever. “ _What did your brother do to your governess?_ ”  
Alan just chuckles and squirms his way into his father’s lap and Papa sighs and says, “You’re getting too big for this, you know?” But he lets him nestle between his strong arms so that Alan can feel safe. 

_Rasp, rasp, rasp_ goes the sword upon the whetstone. His father’s sword is polished thunder metal, and its shining blade looks like it was forged out of bottled smoke. It is Alan’s favourite thing in the whole world and one day he wishes he will have one just like it. He reaches out and touches the sword, leaves a smudged thumbprint on the shining blade. 

“Careful, it’s sharp.” 

This seems poor logic. “If it’s already sharp why must you sharpen it?”

“Because it’s not sharp enough.”

“But what must it be sharp for? Papa?”

But his father doesn’t answer and for a second it’s like he has gone away in his head and that frightens Alan very much, because that’s what John does, goes away in his head, sometimes for days on end.

But when Alan tugs on his sleeve his father returns and looks down at him and smiles and tweaks his nose so that Alan laughs.

“Papa, will you tell me about the names again?” 

And Papa huffs and puffs and gives an exaggerated sigh and says, “That old thing. You don’t want to hear that old thing.”

“I do! I do!”

“Well, I suppose I can tell you one more time.”

“You can. You can!” Alan nods vigorously. 

Papa plucks him up and settles him on his knee. “When I was a squire, not much older than you, I was called Wart and my father gave me a sword which had been his father’s and his father’s father’s, and the sword was called _Spring Storm_. I thought I was very fine and grand with it, until one day I rode beneath the window of the topmost tower,” He points to the western tower and the dark mouth of the topmost window. “And on the tower balcony stood a princess with hair like fire. ‘Look,’ she called out, ‘there goes the Wart with _Pigsticker_ , I wonder whose chickens he’s chasing today?’”

“Mama,” whispers Alan. 

“Well, I wouldn’t stand for that. So I trained hard every day to prove myself a hero.  And when I was older and had earned my spurs, my sword was called _Light’s Tooth_ and I was known as Sir Geoffrey. And with it I slayed the Ogre of Oystermire and the dragon of Dervale and Cagos the Blood Smith.”

“And Tyain the Black Knight.” Alan volunteers. That part is always Alan’s favourite. 

“And him. And everyone who saw me pass upon my horse would say, ‘There goes brave Sir Geoffrey and _Light’s Tooth_ off to save the kingdom, no doubt’, except for the bossy little princess, who would gaze from her balcony and stamp her foot and toss her hair and say, ‘That Sir Geoffrey, he’s not so brave or so good. He’s just a jumped up squire who’s putting on airs. Why, I knew him when he was just The Wart.’

“And then, much later, I became king and my sword was called _Heart’s Desire_ and I was known as _**Your Majesty**_.” 

Alan chortles.

“Except when I was safe in the topmost tower room. For I had won the heart of the princess with the sunset hair, who I had loved since she first called my name. And even though we had new names now, in that room she was still Princess and I was still just the Wart. In that room she and I made our vow to love each other always. And in that room, nine months later, the proof of our vow came screaming, bawling into the world with lungs like a forest elk and eyes a lot like these.” He pokes Alan between the eyes and Alan laughs again and rubs the spot on his brow.

“And in that same room four further miracles were born to the princess and I, each louder and crankier than the last, until the fifth was born and he was the loudest and crankiest of them all.”

“And now…?”

“And now…” There’s a crack in his papa’s voice like a snapping twig and that’s wrong because it’s not the way the story is supposed to go and also it’s not the way his Papa is supposed to sound. And something strange passes across Papa’s face, like a cloud over the face of the sun. “Sometimes I think I am the one who has lived my entire life in that room.”

“Papa,” Alan butts him, “Tell it right.”

And the cloud passes on. “And now I am a father and my sword is called _Thunderbringer_ and I am known simply as ‘ _Papa, papa. PAPA!_ ’”

Alan guffaws with delight as if he has never heard this story before and holds his breath for the last little bit.

“And a long time from now, when my sons are grown and have sons of their own –”

“Alan! _Alan_!” 

There comes the sound of light footsteps on the river bank. The wind plucks at an old blue cloak and Scott appears at the top of the bank. “Alan!”

Alan jumps up on Papa’s lap, waves his arms, over-balances and nearly falls except Papa steadies him with his arm. “Here I am, Scott.”

Scott’s face is pale as the frost and it makes his eyes stand out even more. “I thought you’d gone in the river. You shouldn’t run off like that. We were looking for you.”

“I’m sorry.” And for that moment he is, because he didn’t mean to scare Scott, didn’t mean to run off. Had just needed to be away from the hot stuffy room, and from Governess and from everything. “Scott, I found Papa.”

“Oh.” Scott goes still, and now his face is white as the snow. “Hello, Sir.”

Papa’s hand has stopped moving the sword across the whetstone and the gentle rasping sound that is so comforting has gone away. Alan can see every tendon and vein standing out on Papa’s arm, as if he’s squeezing the sword too tight. 

“Boy,” he says, and the voice he uses isn’t his Papa voice, or even his kinging voice, “Why aren’t you at your lessons?”

“Sorry, Sir. We were – I was – I’m sorry, Sir.”

“Go back to the castle. I have your brother in hand.”

“Yes, Sir,” says Scott. His gaze drops to his feet. “Whatever you say.”

He turns and walks back towards the castle, doesn’t even wave at Alan.

Alan drops back into his father’s lap. Suddenly he’s cold. He presses up against Papa for warmth, feels the tickle of the hairs on Papa’s chin, the soft burr of his laughter, feels better. “Papa, are you cross with me?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you cross with Scott?”

“No.” The answer is a long time coming. 

He wants to tell him the brave thing Scott did, how he saved Alan. He wants to make Papa proud of Scott. He wants him to smile when he sees Scott. He wants Scott not to look sick when he sees Papa.  

But a promise is a promise so Alan says nothing, except, “Papa, will your sword ever have another name?”

But his father doesn’t reply, only pulls him a little closer and rests his chin upon his head as he slides stone across metal. 

He polishes his sword until it gleams all the colours of the storm and its blade is as sharp as a kept secret.


	4. Gargoyles & Firewood

_“Full fathom five thy father lies;_  
_Of his bones are coral made;_  
_Those are pearls that were his eyes:_

_\- The Tempest_

A prince stands alone on a high tower.

There’s a thin stone skirt that runs along the top of the eastern tower. If you’re careful, you can climb out the tower window and walk all the way around to where the gargoyles look out to sea.

If you’re not careful, you will end up a wet splat on the cobblestones two hundred feet below, but, so far, Virgil has always been careful.

No one has ever told him that he can’t come out here. It probably has never occurred to anyone that they needed to. Virgil is the middle child, after all. Responsible, dependable, well behaved, by far the least trouble of all his brothers.

Now there’s no one to tell him that he can’t.

He paces around the edge of the tower and slings an arm over Rex the gargoyle, crouches down in Rex’s shadow for protection against the wind’s razor edge. It’s blowing in from the north, brings with it the scent of snow.

Down on the beach he can see the wooden pyres growing higher. Tonight they will be lit to celebrate the end of winter and Virgil will be able to see them burn from his window.

A week ago it seemed uncertain that the festival would even go ahead. But though the kingdom is in a state of chassis, it is not yet in a state of mourning. Sometime soon the council will have to declare the king dead, name Scott ruler, appoint a regent until he comes of age. Then the people will have to take out their mourning blacks, let their hair and beards grow, cover over the lamps. But for now, despite the rumours, the Council have let it be known that the king has simply taken a long journey and that the festival should continue.

Still it would be unseemly if the five princes were to attend the festival without their father.

So while in previous years he could go out among the people, pretending to be a mummer or fisherman’s boy, eating apples baked in the ashes, getting his feet crushed in the wild dance around the biggest bonfire, this year he will watch from his window or from his perch among the gargoyles.

He pats Rex’s weathered paw, feeling the claws that close around the ledge. He wonders if he wished hard enough would the stone crack around those paws, would Rex shake masonry from his leathery wings and carry him off.

He wonders if it would work if he were Scott.

But Rex stays asleep and so does the castle, clinging to the shore below him like a cluster of mussels stuck to the rock. Both of them await some charm stronger than Virgil’s wishes to wake them. The coming of summer maybe, or a new king.

Then he sees the figure he’s been waiting for ride out of the woods, blue cloak flapping in the wind. He pats Rex goodbye and hurries back inside, through the trap door, down the tower steps. He runs through the statue hall and down the main stairs. His footsteps echo in every room, and there are no fires in the hearths. The courtiers are all wintering at their estates and Scott has given all the servants leave to go to the festival.

He reaches the yard just as Scott clatters through the gate. His cloak is damp with rain. There’s a creamy lather of sweat on his horse’s neck. Virgil takes hold of Solo’s bridle, steadies the frisky colt as Scott springs down from the saddle. Horse and rider blow steam from their mouths with every breath.

“Nothing,” he says, as if Virgil had expected him to produce their father from his saddle bags. “The cloak they found was black, not grey, and the ring looked nothing like Father’s. But there’s a woman in Bayrem who says a tall man stayed the night with her and fixed her door. I’m going to ride up there to question her at once.”

“Can’t you wait a while? If you ride Solo too hard you’ll make him lame again.”

It’s not entirely fair. The thrown shoe had not been Scott’s fault. But it works. Some of the pomposity drains out of Scott immediately. “Oh. I suppose you’re right.”

Solo is Scott’s pride and joy. He is the first foal out of their mother’s favourite mare, Blue Falcon. His sire is Papa’s prize stallion, Thunder. Scott broke him in and trained him himself and exercises him every day. It’s funny, but animals don’t respond to Scott’s curse the way humans do. He’s just as likely to get bitten by a snarling dog as anyone else and the day he first put a saddle on Solo, all the “Whoa, boy”s in the world hadn’t saved him from being bucked right off and into the swine pen. He had emerged covered head to toe in pig muck and grinning like a loon.

He strokes the horse’s neck. “Then I suppose I can wait and ride up in the morning. Or maybe I should go back to the eastern border again and speak to that gate captain some more. What do you think?”

“They both sound–”

Scott waves him away. “I’ll ask John. He’ll know. Has he had any other ideas since I left?”

“No.”

It’s strange the change that their father’s disappearance and their search for him has worked over his two older brothers.

John is the most centred he’s ever seen him. He seems calm and focused, like he’s got a map in his head of how things must be, like if he follows it step by step to its logical end he will assuredly find their father.

Scott’s search is more frantic. He’s like a horse with an open sore, and the rumours of what has happened to Papa are like flies buzzing around the wound. He naps and snatches at them, off one morning to investigate the rumour of a man living in the north woods, the next evening to view a body washed up on Silver Strand Beach. During the day he clings to John’s system and to John’s certainty with a devout fervour. At night he wakes screaming.

Only Virgil and Gordon know this about him. Alan sleeps too deeply, the library is too far away and Virgil is careful to put a blanket against the door to the east wing each night so the servants won’t overhear their crown prince’s screams. The rumours are already bad enough.

“Scott. _Scott_! Wake up.”

And Scott will thrash and lash out and stare at him with the blank gaze of a sleepwalker, until finally he takes one shuddering breath and goes still.

“Virgil? I thought you were…”

He never says who he thinks he is. Mother? Father? The Magician? He will just rub his eyes and begin to scold Virgil. “You shouldn’t be in here. What if I’d said something stupid?”

“You didn’t. You don’t.” _You just scream. You just scream, Scott._

“But I could.”

Then he’ll pull his blanket around his shoulders, like a monk’s robe and say “You should go back to bed, Virgil. Maybe I’ll go see John. We’ve got so much work to do.”

It’s the one good thing that’s come out of this whole ordeal, the pax between John and Scott.

Virgil remembers the time before John’s confinement when his two older brothers had been inseparable, racing away ahead of him on their ponies, or playing chess by the fire. John had always been the one Scott looked to for answers. Scott had always been the person John went to for help.

The curse had cut that bond as surely as if it had been wished away. Scott avoided the library except on the days when he came up with some new, brilliant, misjudged scheme to help John make his life better, and sulked when John rejected them. John spoke of Scott with a sneer in his voice even when he was not in the room.

Virgil had come to dread quiet family suppers in the library more than anything else. Scott at his most haughty. John at his most cold. Gordon flicking peas at whoever is closest just to try and break the tension. Every year the veneer of civility between them was stripped away a little more. Every year they could stand each other less and less.

Virgil can pinpoint the moment exactly when that changed.

The captain of the guards had come into the library as they ate breakfast together. She had gone down in one knee in front of Scott, bewildering them all until she had said. “Your Highness, your father is missing.”  
  
And Scott had stuttered and stammered and choked on his own words like the village imbecile. “No. You must – I can't – Our father cannot be gone. You must– ”  

Then John had stepped in, smooth and brusque, like he wasn’t the family recluse, like he gave orders to guards all the time, and said, “My brother wishes that you scour the kingdom. Please leave no stone unturned. Find our father. Find the king.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” said the captain, and bowed to Scott. Scott had looked to John and nodded his thanks.

Since then there has been a truce, the two of them have put aside their differences to search for their father.

But every day it becomes more than a truce. It’s like something is waking up between them that they both had forgotten existed, like they are remembering how well they can work together when they try. Scott is humble and uncomplaining as he acts as John’s eyes, his ears, his legs. The barbs have dropped out of John’s speech. He stops and listens to Scott, defers to his expertise on which paths run where and whether they are accessible.

Even the nature of their silences has changed. Instead of sullen and awkward they are the easy silences of companions working together on a common problem.

And last week, Scott had made some comment about the arch-chancellor’s hat and John had actually snorted. His head had been bent over a ledger at the time, so he hadn’t seen the stunned look on Scott’s face, or how the flash of joy that skimmed across his features for half a moment had warmed up his eyes.

It’s enough to make Virgil hope that maybe someday he can have his brothers back and not have to choose between them.

It’s enough to stop Virgil from saying what he’s been thinking:

_That they’re never going to find their father._

Because John may now know lots about tides and routes and patterns of migration, but Virgil knows a thing or two about hunting.

And he knows that trails go cold.

It’s been two months now, and there’s still no sign of their father.

Since the morning he vanished it feels like Virgil’s heard hundreds of stories and theories and guesses as to what happened to Papa but what’s stuck with him is what the gamekeeper told the chief hostler when he didn’t know Virgil was listening. _“If the king don’t want to be found then there’s no critter in the three kingdoms that’s going to find him for you. But if he didn’t just leave, if he were snatched, well whatever did the snatching has to be tougher and cleverer than the king, and that’s not the sort of beasty I’d ever want to face.”_

“What?” His head whips around. Scott’s been talking. “Yeah. Yes.”

“I said 'have you seen Alan?'”

“Oh.”

“It’s just I know I’m not here much. He’s been so quiet lately, and I know he’ll be disappointed not to get to the festival.”

“He’s with John I think, in the library.”

“Oh, good. Then, I’ll take Solo to the stables and see John later. Maybe we could all have dinner and watch the bonfires together.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Scott takes the reins from him, gives him a friendly tap on the shoulder. “We will find him, Virgil. It’ll be okay.”

Virgil nods but thinks the gamekeeper has the right of it. In the months since their father vanished, how many times has he heard Scott say it, shout it, whisper it like a prayer? “We will find Father.”

They have been looking, but they still haven’t found anything, and that means that whatever took their father, it’s just as powerful as the curse.

Virgil’s only ever known two things the curse can’t overcome. One is the interlocking bindings of the curse itself, which mean that Scott can’t just wish John – and himself – free. The other is death. Scott can wish their mother back from dawn to dusk and it will not change a thing.

He knows this, and he knows Scott knows it too.

He wonders what Scott sees when he dreams at night. He wonders what has him screaming. He wonders what he was going to say the night he woke and looked at him with horror in his eyes and blood beneath his fingernails, where he had scratched at old scabs. “Virgil, what if I-? What if I-?”

“What if you what?”

“Mother. I… but what if I…?”

“What, Scott?”

But the fog of sleep burned away and Scott was in control again. “Nothing. It was a dream is all. Go back to bed, Virgil. Sleep.”

And Virgil had no choice but to comply.  

“Scott?” He watches his older brother turn his back to him as he leads his horse away.

“What is it?”

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was something wrong?”

And he wants so badly for Scott to say “Yes, of course.” Because his brother’s no good at lying.

But Scott just smiles and turns away, and there are secrets in his eyes.


	5. The Tale of the Little White Mouse

A little white mouse hides beneath a table.

A mouse can make himself so small that he can’t be seen, can move so quietly he can’t be heard, can be so secret that no one knows he is there at all.

It’s important no one knows the little white mouse is here, because if they see him they’ll make him go to bed. The mouse doesn’t want to go to bed. Not yet. He wants to know what’s happening. So he curls himself up in his smallest ball and waits beneath the table.

“Leave us. All of you.” The mouse’s papa uses his most impressive kinging voice and there is the scrape of chairs and the swish of silk as his subjects rise to leave the hall. The mouse can see their boots and bright petal-like skirts as they move towards the doors. The doors slam and a hush falls again.

“Virgil, go back to your lessons,” says Papa.

“No, Sir. I’d rather stay.” Virgil is polite as anything, but there’s a little bit of kinging in his voice too.

“As you wish, then.”

It’s warm under the table. A black and white hunting dog is sharing the mouse’s hideout. She wags her tail at him, licks his knuckles and his nose, so he has to stifle a giggle. He crawls forward on his belly so he can see better.

His papa sits in his big gold throne at the top of the dais, which he does very rarely. The mouse always likes it when he does. He likes it when his father looks kingly. But he also is a little scared, because when his papa sits in the throne you couldn’t possibly crawl into his lap or ask him to tell you stories. Particularly not now. He looks so stern.

The mouse’s brothers stand at the bottom of the steps. Scott stands at the very edge of the dais steps, Virgil a little way behind him and to his right. They are both looking up at Papa, but Papa is only looking at Scott. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself, boy?”

Scott says nothing, but the mouse sees his hand tighten into a fist behind his back. He is dressed in his best tunic and is even wearing his crown, which the mouse knows he hates because of how heavy it is. It stands out, brassy against his ruddy hair.

“Forgotten how to speak?” Father’s voice booms through the great hall and makes the mouse shiver.

“No.”

“The woman says that you commanded her. That you stole her will and made it your own. She says my son, the crown prince of Melchior, is a witch. That you should be burned. _What do you have to say for yourself_?”

There is a great silence in the hall. The spaniel crawls up beside him, presses up against his side. The mouse slides his arm around her.

“Father, you don’t understand.” It’s Virgil speaking again. He’s not in his best clothes, just his ordinary browns. His hands twist behind his back.  

“Let him speak for himself.” Papa waves his hand. His gaze falls on Scott.

A muscle throbs in Scott’s jaw. “It’s true. I commanded her.”

“I see. And what did she do to you? Did she insult you?”

“No.”

“Mock you?”

“No! _”_

“Find fault with you? Did she threaten to hurt you? You, a strapping prince of the realm and her a harmless old woman?”

_“Harmless!”_

“Did she frighten you, boy? Is that what happened?”

They’re talking about Governess. And he feels his heart rise in his chest like a little flapping bird. But it’s okay, it’s okay, because he’s a mouse, and mice don’t have governesses and mice don’t tell lies, and mice don’t have to do anything but run and squeak and eat cheese and curl up into little balls when they are sad or afraid.

“She never touched me,” says Scott. “She did nothing to me.”

“Then what made her deserve your ire?”

“I know you know what she did!” Scott whirls and jabs a finger at Virgil. “He will have already told you. Didn’t you?”

Virgil ducks his head. “I was only trying to protect you,” he murmurs. “He needed to know. You don’t know what she was saying.”

“He already knows what I am. What’s there to protect me from?”

“Scott…” Virgil’s voice is soft, hurt, and the mouse thinks back to what John told him about Scott…

Alan breaks off the story of the little white mouse, embarrassed, because of course he doesn’t have to tell John what John said to him, John knows.

John’s been watching him closely. He’s hugging one knee to his chest and the other is laid out straight on the rug. He’s forgotten about his toast, let it go cold, and his eyes haven’t slipped off Alan and into the corner of the room once.

“You said that sometimes Scott can hurt you without meaning to. Sometimes he can hurt you just by being close by.”

John looks thoughtful. “I guess I did say that.”

“You say a lot of things about Scott.”

John looks at him strangely. “I… I suppose I didn’t think you’d noticed, Alan.”

“I do,” says Alan.

He had asked Gordon about it once, but Gordon didn’t have an explanation or a funny answer. He’d just kicked at the surf and said, “Yeah, I miss ‘em too.”

“Why don’t you go on with your story,” says John.

Alan nods.

The mouse presses up against the spaniel who whines as his father rises from his chair and says, “Enough of this childishness. We must decide what must be done.”

“What must be done?” asks Virgil and this time his voice is more mouse than king.

“It will not do to have the woman telling the kingdom the crown prince is a witch. It will only breed sedition.”

“What are you going to do?” Scott sounds frightened too.

The King flicks a speck of dust off his cuff. “The woman will be granted high honours and sent away.”

“What? _No._ ”

“It is the best way to silence her wicked accusations.”

“But father –”

“If she were to remain, or to spread her treason beyond our borders, it would only cause unrest. I will grant her a title for her loyal service and send her to Veridian. The queen there has two girls and a boy. I will arrange for her to care for them.”

_“You will not!”_

The silence in the hall is deep and terrible, so terrible that Alan forgets for a moment that he is a mouse. All he wants to do is go and run and hide behind Virgil’s legs, climb into Papa’s lap, bury is head and not have to look. Then the spaniel whines and presses her cold nose to his cheek and he remembers again.

His father clears his throat. “As it happens no, I will not. I have already exiled her to Skaros. She may spread her poison there to whoever will listen. Few shall.”

Scott rocks on his heels, like he’s been pushed over, like he might fall. “Another test.”

“Yes. Another test.”

“Father, I didn’t mean… It just slipped out. You didn’t see… I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry. You’ve said it, so I suppose it must be true. Now get out of my sight.”

“Father…”

“Now, Scott. I may not be able to command your will but I am your king and your father, I will command your obedience. You will spend the next two nights confined to your room, thinking over what you have done. And when those days of confinement are over I will decree that no servant will bring food or drink to the library.”

“What? _What?_ ”

“If you want your brother to eat you will bring him his meals yourself. You have avoided the library for too long. It’s time to reflect on your sins. You are dismissed.”

Scott bows low, a perfect courtly bow of a perfect courtly prince. Then he spins on his heel and walks from the room.

“Father.” The slam of the door brings Virgil to life, he walks to the bottom of the dais, stands on the first step. “Father, please.”

Papa’s eyes are hard. “A king leads, Virgil. That is the first thing a king does. It is why we are granted such grace. A king must inspire. A king must command, but only a despot gives no choice, remember that.”

“Papa, what are you talking about?”

The king rises and walks down the steps. He ignores Virgil and walks to the window, gazes out at the snow. “What would you do if your older brothers were wicked men?”

“What? But they’re not. They’re Scott and John.”

“But if they were. _What would you do_?”

“Papa, I don’t understand.”

“No. Not yet.” Papa removes his crown and polishes it with his hand. “Take your brother and go.”

“What? Oh.” His gaze follows Papa’s pointing finger.

A moment later a pair of boots stop beside the table. Virgil kneels down and crawls under the table. “Hey, Alan.”

“I’m a mouse.”

“Sure you are.” He strokes the spaniel’s head, and she bats her tail at him. “But I think it’s time for bed.”

Alan’s limbs are heavy with sleep and Virgil lets him climb on his back so he can carry him to bed. With his head resting against Virgil’s neck, he feels better. A little anyway. The spaniel follows them up the stairs.

“Virgil?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“Is this my fault?”

“No, bud. Definitely not.”

Virgil tucks him into bed. The spaniel jumps up on the bed too and rests her head on Alan’s chest, licks his elbow. He laughs. “See, you’ve made a friend.”

“Virgil, will you tell Scott I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. If I’d known what I did wrong I wouldn’t have done it.”

He remembers his governess with her cold smile and pinching hands, and how she always seemed to know when Alan was lying, even when Alan himself did not, and how she would sometimes beat him with a cane to punish him.

He had tried hard to stop lying, but she had only beat him more.

He had tried to ask his brothers how he could be better, but no one had understood what he was asking, until the day Scott caught her and snatched the cane from her hand and bellowed, “You will never strike him again!”

And Alan feels sick now, because in his heart of heart he is glad that Governess is gone, though he knows it has only brought more sadness for Scott.

Virgil sits on his bedside and says, “Alan, none of that was your fault.”

But Alan is not so sure and he thinks…

But that’s when John stops the story of the little white mouse. “Alan, _none_ of that was your fault.” His hands fall heavy on Alan’s shoulders. “It was _her fault,_ Gods, and mine and Scott’s and Papa’s for not seeing what had been done to you, but none of this was ever on you, do you understand?”

Alan nods timidly, because maybe if John and Virgil and Scott all say it, maybe it’s true.

“If anything like that ever happens to you again, if anyone ever tries to hurt you, or you see anything or hear anything that frightens you, you come find me or find Scott and tell us, understand. I promise we’ll believe you.” John pinches his shoulders. “I’m so sorry this happened. If I… If I… Gods.”

Alan nods and thinks again how lucky he is to have four favourite brothers.

But then he feels suddenly bad again, because John looks so sad now, but Alan has not got to the worst part of his story yet.


	6. Salt & Oranges

_“Thou shalt be free_  
_As mountain winds: but then exactly do_  
_All points of my command.”_  
_― The Tempest_

A boy drags a hamper up a stairway.

This is a challenge for a little prince, even one as stubborn as Gordon, because the hamper is heavy and he has to stop every ten steps to catch his breath and give his aching arms a rest. But he started this on his own, and he is determined to finish it, so he ignores the offers for help from the laughing servants who pass him on the stairs on their way down to the festival, and perseveres.

He even resists the temptation to open the hamper, which is hard going when you’re panting and sweat is dripping into your eyes and you can only imagine what treasures are inside.

The hamper had been a present from Captain Taylor, whose ship had made port this morning, and who had caught Gordon trying to sneak aboard. “We must be doing something right, boys, because the rats‘re trying to climb on, not off,” he’d said, and threatened to make Gordon walk the plank, though he had said it with a twinkle in his eye.

Later, he had let Gordon tour the _First Shadow_ and then taken him to his cabin, sat him on his desk and told him the news of the outer isles and asked, “How you boys holding up, up there in that damn, dusty castle? No place to raise five growing boys, that’s what I always told your father. Boys need sea and sun and hard work. But _argh_ , can’t be helped now, I guess.”

Afterwards he had given Gordon the hamper to bring back to the castle. A tithe, he’d said with a wink, for his young liege lords, but Gordon knew all about Captain Taylor and his activities and knew what was really in that hamper. _Loot!_

Almost as importantly, tucked away in the inner lining of his coat are the papers taken from Taylor’s bursar, a list of all the ships that have docked in the ports of the outer isles in the last two months. He’s bringing them to the library, ready to be snatched up and pulled apart, to become part of John’s swirling vortex of names and numbers and places, at the heart of which, they hope, lies their father.

And maybe his most important burden of all is the news that Captain Taylor told him in confidence. That when he left Casper two days ago, the king’s ship was making ready for sea and the pink and golden flag of the princess was hanging limp, ready to be hoisted for her arrival.

For himself this news means nothing. Gordon doesn’t like girls, especially not this girl, who is blonde and bossy and pug-nosed and who, when he went to the trouble of putting a newt in her riding boots, didn’t shriek or cry or do any of the things normal girls are supposed to do, just stared at it with her beady little blue eyes, then snatched it up and dropped it down the back of Gordon’s trousers.

But John will want to know. John is always glad when the pink flag flaps into port. For whatever crazy reason, he and _The Girl_ have been friends for years. And if anyone says that Gordon is jealous of John, of the easy way he makes her laugh when Gordon’s funniest, lewdest jokes meet with an arched eyebrow, of the way she creeps up the stairs to visit John and not Gordon after midnight, well, well, he’s _not_ , okay?

He supposes he should go tell Scott too, if he’s back, so Scott can arrange to disappear. Scott has got very good at avoiding The Girl. He defers his hawking duties to Virgil, makes Gordon take her riding, expects John to be her dining companion. Sometimes Gordon wonders idly if Scott got a newt dropped down his britches too, but deep down he knows the truth. It’s the same reason Scott prefers the company of dogs and horses now. It’s the same reason John is in the tower. The curse colours everything his brothers do.

Sometimes Gordon wishes he could just run away, go to sea with Captain Taylor and never look back, never have to set foot on this island again, be free, so he would never have to think about his brothers or his father or the curse or The Girl again.

But not today. Today he’s going to get this hamper to the top of the tower if it _kills_ him.

He is almost there when Alan comes down the stairs against him.

“Hey Al, guess…” But Alan doesn’t look at him, or even stop, just squeezes past him and keeps going down the stairs. “Hey! Alan!”

He wants to go after him, but if he lets go of the hamper now it’s going to slide back down the stairs and all his work will have been for nothing, so he has to keep going to the top.

He kicks open the door so it bangs against the wall and drags the hamper inside. “Good morrow, good brother!”

John sits in the corner they have cleared so that he can find their father. He stares up at the carefully ordered charts and maps in a fixed way, like he is deep in thought. The little pixie sits on his shoulder. She pats his cheek.

That little oasis of calm and order always lifts Gordon’s spirits. He remembers too well those first, black days after his father vanished, how he had haunted the docks or the castle battlements and wondered how they ever might go on. And then John had taken a map and a string and a piece of charcoal and drawn a circle around the castle and its environs and said, “This is the furthest a man on foot can travel in a day. We start our search here. Can you bring me the names of the ships that were docked that day?”

And every day, with every snippet of information he, Virgil and Scott has been able to scrounge for John, the structure of information he’s built has grown richer and deeper and more complex, and every day since, Gordon has slept a little better, felt a little brighter, known with more and more certainty that whatever force had snatched away his father, it better be living in fear, because in words and in dates and in co-ordinates, his amazing, brilliant brother will run it to ground.

Gordon wipes the sweat off his brow. “Phew! I brought treasure. Who spit in Alan’s porridge? He was out of here like his pants were on fire.”

Able to give into temptation at last, he falls on the hamper, unbuckles it and lifts the lid, lets the spoils come tumbling out. There are bottles of golden spice wine, dried chillies and boxes of saffron, cumin and cacao, tart limes and a bushel of oranges, spun sugar angels and lemon curd.

He plucks up a lime and bites into it, grins at the intensity of the flavour. Snatching a handful of oranges from the basket he begins to juggle them absently as he makes his way over to John. “Johnny, you got to try some of these. There’s coffee beans. _And tea._ You know who loves tea, right?”

When he gets no response he sighs dramatically. “’Why, no, Gordon. Seeing as I subsist on moonlight and my own sense of self satisfaction, I take no notice of what mortals eat. Who likes tea?’ ‘Why, her worshipfulness highness, princess bossy pants herself, the Lady Penelope just loves tea.’ ‘But why would it matter if the Princess Penelope likes tea, seeing as she is far away in Caspar. Sad frown.’ ‘Funny you should mention that, big brother, because I was just talking to Captain Taylor and he said…”  

“Huh?” John looks around as if he has only just noticed he was there. “What did you say?”

Gordon repeats, slower. “Captain Taylor’s just come from Caspar. He says that Princess Penelope makes ready to sail on the king’s ship. She should be here by new moon, he thinks.”

Remembering his other charge, he drops the oranges, making sure to bounce one off John’s head, and fishes the papers out of his pocket. He dangles them in front of John’s nose. One by one the oranges bounce to the floor. One rolls beneath John’s foot.

“Oh, I see,” says John. “I…”

He makes no effort to take the papers, so Gordon balances them on his knee instead.

John focus slowly comes to his knee. Then he looks around the room.

“Where’s Alan? He was here just a moment ago.”

“I met him coming down the stairs against me. He seemed in a big hurry. Did something happen? John?”

“I yelled at him. I shouldn’t have done that. I never used to do that.” He seems puzzled. As if his own behaviour is a problem he can’t solve. He looks at his feet and sees the orange, picks it up.

“About what?” Gordon asks. But John doesn’t seem to have heard. He rolls the orange between the palms of his hands. “What did you fight about, Johnny?”

“He told me a story about a sleeping prince.”

Gordon can feel the hairs standing up at the back of his neck. “What does that mean?” he asks. “John, did you hit your head again? You’ve got to be careful. We need that head.” But his laugh sounds brittle, even to him.

John’s nails dig into the waxy skin of the orange, leaving little crescent moon marks. Over and over he slides it between his palms.

“It’s just I realised something,” he says. “I miss the smell of oranges.”

Then, before Gordon knows what’s happening, John’s on his feet, ripping, clawing the charts from the walls. Pins cascade to the floor, ribbon pools in silken rivers by his feet. Eos buzzes around him, pulls at his forelock, like he’s a horse she can rein in, but he bats her away with the flat of his hand, then flings the contents of the writing desk to the ground. The ink pot smashes and the dark pool of black ink seeps across the floor, obliterating the markings on the torn up map fragments and oozing into the whirls and hollows of the floorboards. John doesn’t seem to care. He tramps straight through the mess, seizes up an armful of his carefully curated papers and flings them onto the fire. The paper curls and blackens.

“John. Johnny! _John_!”

Gordon doesn’t know what to do, how to stop him destroying all his careful work, does the only thing he can think of, which is to fling his arms around John’s shoulders. The worst bit, the absolute _worst bit_ is when he realises he’s stronger now than his brother, than his big brother, his wise big brother who always knows what to do, who held their hope of finding their father in his hands. John’s arms beat against him weakly as he tries to rip free, to destroy that hope along with all his work. The keening sound he makes is like an injured animal.

“John, stop. Please stop. Please. All your hard work.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says John. “It doesn’t matter. We’re never going to find him. He’s never coming back. Never. Never. I’m never getting out of here. I’ll never see him again.”

At some point John’s arms stop beating at him. At some point they both sink to the floor. At some point John goes still, and Gordon can feel the great wheezing breaths that rumble through him. Gordon wants to scream out, to call for help. But there’s no one left to call to.

“John, Johnny, please don’t give up.” Gordon leans his head against John’s shaking back. “Please be brave. Please. I’ll find him, I promise I’ll find him for you.”

John just shakes his head over and over. His sobs are terrible, violent shuddering things.

“Please, Johnny. I’ll do anything. I’ll find him. I’ll comb the seas. I’ll never set foot on dry land again until I find him. Let me turn into sea foam if I do. I promise. I promise.”

“Don’t say things like that,” John’s voice is hoarse and thick with phlegm. “It’s dangerous. You don’t know how dangerous it is.”

“I don’t care. I’ll do it, I swear. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“You should leave, Gordon. Run away to sea, never come back. There’s nothing left for you here.”

It’s like he’s holding a mirror up to Gordon’s own feelings. How many times has he thought about the day he could run away? How easy would it be to slip away? To live a life of salt spray and freedom, all attachment cut away?

But then there would be no one to bring John oranges. No one to hold Virgil’s pony as he puts a poultice on its hoof or to teach Alan how to swim. No one to put cold porridge in Scott’s boots so he knows that not everyone is scared of him. No one to take The Girl riding.

No one to put his head against his brother’s shaking back.

No one to tell him it’ll be okay, that their father is coming back, that they are still a family. That there is still something to cling to. That they will live happily ever after.

No one to lie.

So today is not that day.

They just sit there, the two of them, as close as they’ve ever been. Close enough that Gordon can’t tell where John’s shaking ends and his own begins.

They sit there for a long time.

Eventually Gordon works up the courage to ask, “Did something happen? Did Alan say something? Did he do something?”

“He told me– He said that– He heard–”  

He takes another deep breath and suddenly the shuddering stops.

And then he says in a voice as calm as a glassy sea. “But he was lying. I see that now.”

“What?”

Then John says in that same dry, papery voice. “Let go of me please, Gordon. I’m fine.”

Gordon lets go like he’s been hugging an anaconda.

John stands up. The change in him is instant and it’s frightening, more frightening even than his sudden collapse. His features are composed, doll-like almost, terribly calm. On instinct, Gordon looks around, as if someone could have worked this change. As if some puppet master is waiting in the wings. But Scott is nowhere to be seen.

“It was a lie. Of course it was. Alan is scared and lonely. He’s too young to make sense of the world himself, so he makes up stories to deal with what he sees.” John is talking to himself.

“What are you talking about?”

“I should have seen it before, really. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be over-tired.”

“John…”

But he doesn’t look at him, looks instead around at the room. “This place is really a mess. I need to tidy up."

“John, what’s happening? You’re scaring me. What about Papa?”

“You know, I think I’ll move the book shelves back the way they were. I liked them better like that. I really don’t need that space.”

John looks at him and for a second he thinks he sees it, the bottled up grief, corked and locked away in the cellar again. Gordon realises with a pang that it’s not Scott that’s doing this, it’s John. Something, some small change has allowed John mastery of himself again, and now that he has, the gates have sprung shut with Gordon on the outside. The moment for him to be vulnerable, to be anything but _just fine_ is gone.

“If you don’t mind, Gordon, I’ve got a lot of work to do if I want to tidy this up. Please leave.”

And Gordon wants to scream, or weep, or laugh, or all three together at once. And for that single moment what he wants more than anything else is to have Scott’s curse, so he can scream, “Talk to me. Let me in. Tell me what I need to do to help you,” and it will matter a damn.

Instead he says “I… right. I’ll send someone for the hamper.”

“Please.”

Gordon pulls the door out behind him. At the turn of the stairs he stops and sits.

Presently, he hears the sound of a wire brush skritching back and forth across the floor. It’s the sound of John as he tries to scrub the dark splotch of ink from the floor boards.

Gordon listens for a long time, but it’s the only sound he hears.


	7. The Tale of the Knight of Roses

A man waits by a garden gate.

At first the smallest prince doesn’t even notice, he’s too busy fending off the blows of the Dread Pirate Roberts. 

“Surrender.”

“Never!”

_“Die, ye mangy dog!”_

The smallest prince is a knight today, defending the king’s garden from the wicked corsair who has come to steal its magic roses. They fence back and forth across the garden, a maelstrom of deadly motion as their wooden swords clack against each other.

But he stops mid-blow when he hears their father call Scott’s name.

The punishment for his lack of concentration is a rap across the knuckles. He drops his sword with a yelp and Roberts snatches it out of the air. “Yer treasure’s mine now, me hearty.” With a crow of triumph he disappears into the rose garden with both swords. 

“Gordon!” Alan sucks his knuckles and makes to give chase, but stops when he hears his father say his brother’s name again.

“Scott.”

His father is still standing at the gate. He is dressed plainly, as if for hunting, in his old grey winter cloak and riding boots. _Thunderbringer_ hangs by his side, and a cruel hunting knife beside it. Everything about him is grey, as if he has turned to granite. Alan wants to run to him, but it’s as if his feet are frozen to the ground, so strange and solemn does his father look. 

Instead Alan turns to Scott. Scott sits on a stone bench, a book in his hand and his old blue cloak wrapped tight around his shoulders to keep out the cold. He sets the book down as he rises, and his breath mists in the winter air. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s time.”

Scott nods and walks to where his father waits.

“Hey! Wait a minute.” Virgil’s voice settles Alan’s stomach just a little. The warmth of it cracks the fingers of ice that are creeping through the garden and into Alan’s chest. 

He slides down from one of the trees, his precious sketchbook in hand. Alan had forgotten he was there until just now. “Wait! Scott!” He jumps the last few feet to the ground and runs towards older brother. 

Scott turns to him and his mouth is a small O. “Virgil.”

“Where are you going?” Virgil wants to know. He reaches out to grab hold of his sleeve. 

“Don’t!” says Scott, snatching his hand away. “You’ve got to stay-”

Alan sees Virgil flinch. He takes a couple of steps back with a harsh intake of breath. 

Scott sees and his eyes fall. His face flushes red. “’msorry,” he murmurs.

“Scott, I…” Virgil is red faced too. “I didn’t mean… I know you wouldn’t…”

Scott shakes his head and looks to their father for help. 

“Stay here, Virgil,” says the king. 

“But…”

“It will be alright.”

“But, father…”

“Stay and look after your brothers.”

So Virgil stays put where he is, frozen to the spot as their brother follows their father out of the garden. 

The garden gate closes behind them.

Princes don’t cry, not even small ones. Still, he can feel it now, welling up inside him from the pit of his stomach, except he doesn’t understand why. “Virgil, what’s happening?”

But Virgil doesn’t seem to see what’s threatening to spill over inside Alan, because he just says, “Alan, stay here and find Gordon. I’ve got to go tell John,” and takes off at a run towards the castle. 

“He came to find _me_?”

John’s still listening with that careful attention, his eyes have not left Alan’s face. His face looks drawn and his fingers are laced together, just like Papa’s would be. He has forgotten to stoke the fire, and the room is getting cold, or maybe that’s just Alan.

Alan nods. 

“I don’t remember,” says John. 

Alan shakes his head. 

“Does Virgil remember?” 

Alan shakes his head again. 

“Just you?”

“Alan nods.”

“Scott said that he never saw father that morning.” John is talking to himself. “He told me and Virgil… We believed him. He had no reason to lie.” He blinks. “Alan, go on with your story.” 

Alan nods.

The garden gate bangs closed behind Virgil. Alan is left alone in the garden. 

He’s a knight, guarding the king’s roses, but there are no roses in winter. 

He knows that a good prince would wait, would find Gordon, would do what he is told.

The smallest prince follows his father and brother into the woods.


	8. Mare & Fool

**For the squeamish among you, this chapter contains a brief depiction of medieval medicine and surgery.**

 

_“Thought is free”_

_\- The Tempest_  
  
A boy grooms his mother’s horse.

And speaks softly to it, as he smooths its coat with a fine brush. Alone in the stable, he whispers to his mother’s mare all the fears and secrets he cannot find the voice to say aloud.

“Scott?”

Alan peers over the stable door. The pale, wintry light in the yard outside leeches the colour out of his hair and eyes, and for a moment it’s like someone has walked over Scott’s grave, like he’s seeing the spectre of his little brother. “You’re home?”

“Hey, Alan.” Scott unbolts the stable door and beckons Alan in. “I thought you were with John.”

“I was.”

“Wanna come see?” He coaxes him into the stable.

Little brother is still nervous around horses since his grey pony threw him off. But the mare is sweet and gentle and Scott shows him how to talk to her in a calm voice, to stroke her nose without frightening her, to let her blow on his fingers as she gets to know him. He even finds an apple in his pocket for Alan to give to her if he keeps his fingers flat and is careful not to get bitten.

Alan laughs as she slobbers and lips at his hand, tickling his fingers as she finishes the apple in two bites. Then Scott places his hand on her swollen belly and lets him feel the kick of the foal within.

Alan hiccups with surprised laughter. “Whoa! Is she having a baby?”

“Soon now.” The foal will be the third out of his mother’s mare, full brother or sister to Solo. He knows his father had hoped there would one day be a mount for each of them, a little piece of their mother they could all share.

There’s a two year old filly out in the paddock too. Scott had always hoped… Well it doesn’t matter what he hoped. The filly will need breaking soon, whether she has a rider or not. He knows that Virgil comes out to the paddock sometimes and watches her with longing in his eyes. He knows Virgil would never, ever dare ask for what he wants.

Alan is gazing at the mare, besotted. “Good girl, thatsa good girl. You’re so clever.”

In that moment Scott makes a decision.

Something will have to be done, Virgil’s legs already dangle well past his pony’s sides. He needs a proper mount, and Gordon is a decent but unenthusiastic horseman, and John won’t… John might never… John was never that great a rider anyway. “I was thinking I would give her second filly to Virgil to ride, and that this third foal could belong to you.”

“Me?”

“Yes you. When he’s older.”

Alan nods, struck dumb. He presses his face against Falcon’s flank and inhales the scent of horseflesh that reminds Scott of their father.

And then he turns his head and says in his smallest voice. “Scott, why did you send father away?”

When Scott was nine years old he had been inflicted with the worm intestine, and the doctors had told his parents that if they cut for the stone then he might die but that if they did not then he certainly would. The physics had given him dwale and strong brandy and tied him to the bed with leather straps and placed a bung in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his own tongue. Then they had cut into his stomach as he thrashed and screamed, and chopped out the little sack of pus and foul humours that had been poisoning him from within.

Afterwards, he had lain in a fever for 21 days. He remembers it in nightmares mostly. In rats climbing the walls and screams bottled up inside his head, in thirst like the heart of the desert and the sounds of Death rattling its chains as it scaled the castle wall to come for him. He remembers John, stretched to monstrous proportions, whispering, “You can’t. You can’t die and leave me king.” He remembers his father standing in the doorway as he told his mother, “I’ll take the hunt into the woods until the moon turns. If the boy dies, send word.”

He thought there could never again be such pain in the world.

But this comes close.

“What?”

“Why did you send him away?”

His first reaction is panic. That Alan knows. That somehow Alan, in his innocence, has looked right through the bones of his skull and seen the guilt that’s written there, in red ink on the back of his eyes. “I didn’t.”

“You did. I heard you.”

But the panic fades in an instant. This is just Alan, poor Alan, made to wander empty halls and play with wooden soldiers while the four of them are locked up in the library with their maps and plans. He’s scared and he’s lonely and he’s making up stories just to get attention and that is Scott’s fault. He should have been more careful, should have given him his time. That must be it.

“No, no, buddy. Father disappeared. You know that. No one knows where he went. But we’re looking for him. Virgil and Gordon and John and I, we’re looking. We’ll find him.”

“No, you won’t.” And Alan seems so certain that for a moment it shakes Scott’s certainty too.

“Alan!”

Alan shakes his head. “You said no one would ever find him. That’s what you said.”

The bile is warm and noxious at the back of Scott’s throat. “Alan, that’s a lie!”

Alan blinks. “It’s a lie,” he says dully.

“No, don’t…” He tugs at his hair. “Don’t say it because I say it. Only say it if you believe it.”

“I’ll only say it if I believe it,” Alan repeats.

“I didn’t send him away!”

 _If I say it, it must be true. If I say it, it must be true_.

Does it work that way? He still doesn’t know. If he says that the sky is purple will it be purple or will he only think that? But if he says it often enough, then it must be true. If he says it enough times he’ll believe it.  

Falcon wickers, nervous now.

He takes a step towards Alan. “Don’t you believe me?”

Alan backs away a little. “I don’t know. John says-”

“John! _Don’t ever–!_ ” He stops himself just in time, feels himself dangle at the edge of the precipice. “Not everything John says about me is true.”

Alan nods a little uncertainly. “But he says…”

_“It doesn’t matter what he says right now!”_

Because it’s not true. It can’t be true. He can’t remember. And if it were true he would remember. Dreams are just dreams, after all. There’s no truth in them. He scrubbed the blood from under his fingernails. He burned the four letters he found among his things. The ones in his hand that he doesn’t remember writing. The ones that begin, “If I go into the woods and do not return...”

In his dreams his father’s hard grey eyes follow him. In his dreams his father’s sword gleams like a moonlit sea. In his dreams shame and horror cut as hot and sharp as the surgeon’s knife.

But dreams are just dreams.

“I didn’t send him away.” He takes another step towards Alan, who shrinks away until his back is against the stable wall.

And this just makes Scott _angry_. Because why does Alan back away when there’s nothing to fear? What _right_ does Alan have to be afraid of him when all he’s done has be kind to him? Does Alan not know how it looks, when his own brother cringes before him, like he’s some sort of… like he’s some sort of…?

He thinks of it. He thinks of Alan running from here to the castle. He thinks of him telling the story to all who will listen.

And he thinks of how John will look at Scott with knowing eyes. Of how Virgil will tell him that he forgives him and then vanish into the forest for days. How Gordon will kick and scream and bite and yell until there is no more fight left in him. How the people – his people – will shrink from him, will cast their eyes down or smile at him with false faces.

How everyone will believe Alan.

And the people will be kind. “The prince is not a wicked man,” they will say.

And what they will mean is, “The prince is not a wicked man, for a wicked man may choose to be either bad or good. A wicked man may mend his ways. The prince is not a wicked man.”

The prince is a monster.

And a monster cannot change its nature.

Alan is staring at him. His eyes are not his father’s eyes. They are not cold like his father’s eyes. But they are close enough. Someday soon maybe they will be just as cold. Sooner or later everyone’s eyes go cold when they look at Scott. He’s seen it in John, in Virgil even, sometimes. He wonders if that’s why his mother died. If he would rather wish her dead then see her look at him like that.

“Scott,” says Alan, “If I do something bad will you send me away too?”

And it’s as if a white flame is lit within Scott. He reaches out and seizes Alan, yanks him roughly, by the collar, by the hair. “Alan, listen to me. Saying that I sent father away is a lie. Saying that I would ever send you away is a lie! And lying is wicked. It’s a wicked, wicked thing. And…” He towers over his little brother, stabbing his finger in his face. “And if you tell anyone that I sent father away, then everyone will know you’re a liar. No one will ever believe you. Because you're just a stupid, scared little kid and everyone knows that little kids like you are too young to understand the truth and so you just make up lies instead. Everyone, everyone will think that about you. Do you understand?”

There is terrible silence as he wills Alan to nod, to understand how grave the situation is, to promise he will never say anything.

“But, Scott,” says Alan and he’s scared now, more scared than Scott has ever seen him, “Scott, I already told John.”

And for a moment Scott’s heart lurches in his chest, like it’s going to stop, like it’s going to burst. He’s not at the edge of the precipice now. He’s over it, he’s falling through the air, towards the rocks below. The horror of his words around him like a lead weight.

But then his heart settles again.

Because Alan is lying.

He knows it with the certainty that he knows his own name. There’s no way he could have told John. He’s just a scared little boy frightened and grieving at the loss of his father and desperate to make up a story that might explain it.

In his relief, Scott’s anger melts. He pulls his little brother into his arms.

“I’m sorry. Oh, Gods, Alan, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it. I just wanted to scare you. It was stupid, I’m so stupid, I’m sorry.” The little boy nods into his shoulder but doesn’t speak. He’s trembling.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll make it right, I will. I promise I’ll make it right.”

He thinks for a moment, thinks as hard as he can, wishes that his father were here, or his mother or someone who could tell him what to do, then speaks with a terrible care. “You will never tell anyone that story. In fact, you will not even know you ever knew it. Just forget, okay? Forget and you’ll be safe.”

“Okay, Scott.” Alan’s eyes are dusky, as if they’re heavy with sleep. “Okay.”

He squeezes him tighter. _And then you’ll be safe. You’ll be safe and my curse can never harm you._


	9. The Tale of the Falling Stars

A brave little boy waits all alone in the forest.

Beside him, his brother sleeps on a mossy bank, on which white lilies and black irises grow, even in winter. He has slept for a long time. 

He slept while the pale midwinter sun hung low in the sky. 

He slept as dusk fell like a pall across the forest.

Now it is dark as pitch and oh so late and no one has come to look for them and still he sleeps.

And Alan has tried all he can think of to wake him, but still he does not stir. Alan thinks sometimes he should run to the castle and fetch help. Except there are beasts in the forest and he can hear their howls, sometimes far off and sometimes close by, and to leave Scott now would be to leave him helpless and unprotected. So Alan stays. 

It’s cold in the forest and Alan is dressed for fighting pirates, not for winter nights. The frost has turned the grass to glass beneath his feet, and runs long fingers up the bank. It has even hung its tiny crystals in the air so it is sharp to breathe in. Sometimes he has to get up and stamp his feet and blow on his fingers.

Scott’s breath comes in tiny icy puffs and his hand when Alan tries to touch it, is cold. His face looks different, younger somehow, when he sleeps, in a way that Alan doesn’t quite understand, but worries him all the same. That his brother, his tall, strong, brave brother, might not be invincible, might be just another kid like him, is a thought like a worm in an apple. 

That John knows everything, that Scott can do anything, that his father, with his big warm hands and his earthy chuckle will always be there, these are lodestars in Alan’s life.

Now it feels like the stars are winking out one by one.

Part of him hopes that this is all just a game, that any minute Gordon will leap out of the trees, shrieking “Boo!” and laughing at Alan’s surprise, and then they will all return to the castle laughing and teasing Alan. 

But the better part knows this can’t be true.

Because, even though his family thinks he’s too young to understand, Alan knows what it means to be cursed. He knows that to live your life between four stone walls can turn you slowly to stone too. He knows that when your tongue binds others you can end up just as tightly bound. He knows what it means when someone says, “You must leave and never return.”

Princes do not get scared. But Alan does not feel like a prince now. He feels like a lost and lonely little boy, who is scared of the dark and the cold and the beasts of the forest, who does not understand the terrible things he just witnessed. 

_The flash of his father’s sword.  
_

_Blood on his brother’s hand.  
_

_His father banished forever.  
_

_His brother falling._

Alan tries all he has left, the truth. “Scott, please wake up. It’s time to go home. Please, Scott. I’m cold and I’m scared. I don’t care what you did to father. I promise. Just wake up.”

But Scott just sleeps on, so Alan waits by his side and holds his hands to his mouth, and does not cry.

And then suddenly there is light in the clearing, a golden light, warm and gentle as his mother’s song.

He looks up, and sees a thousand points of light drifting towards him. 

And the smallest prince thinks, _the stars are falling._

He watches, transfixed, as the starlights float down into the clearing, one by one, until one settles on his nose.

It is, he realises, a little golden person, no bigger than his thumb. Others land on his shoulders, on his hands, on the top of his head. They form a golden filigree blanket that covers Scott. One hovers by Scott’s mouth for a moment, then sneezes three times in quick succession and flutters away.

The fair folk, Alan realises, have come to gather on the bank, just as his mother had always said.

Their light warms Alan’s fingers, his toes. It chases the tendrils of frost away from Scott’s boots and the edges of his cloak. Even better, it scares away the darkness, the doubt. Alan feels his breathing ease again.

“Please,” he says, “Can you stay? Can you stay with us, until morning comes?” 

The little person on his nose gives him an appraising look. The fair folk, his mother always warned him, can be capricious. They often see humans only as a nuisance or an amusement, and they will do nothing for free. But give them a saucer of milk sweetened with honey, and they won’t play their tricks on you.

“Oh,” says Alan, “I don’t have any milk or honey.” He has nothing at all, not even his old wooden sword. “But if you wait, in the morning I’ll bring you milk and honey and pears and sweet cake and…”

The little person throws its head back as if mortally insulted.

“Or you can have gold, or silver, or my crown with the rubies in it. I don’t care. You can have whatever you like, just please stay. Help me look after Scott. Help me keep him warm. He’s my brother.”

But the little person just rises into the air and his fellows follow, Scott’s starry blanket becoming a cloud of brilliant light.

“Wait,” says Alan, “Wait. I know what I can give you.”

And amazingly, the cloud waits, hovers, slowly closes around him. 

So Alan pays with the only currency he has, “Once upon a time,” he says, “There was an island on the edge of the sunset.”

A susurrus goes through the cloud, and the light dims and then brightens. Then slowly it settles again, spreading out on the bank like a glowing carpet, covering the bank, Scott, and Alan himself.

The little person lands on his shoulder and gives him an appraising look, as if to say, “Well, get on with it.”

“Once upon a time,” says Alan. “There was an island on the edge of the sunset, and on that island lived a king and queen and their five brave sons.”


	10. Blood & Moss

_“The clouds methought would open, and show riches_  
_Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,_  
_I cried to dream again.”_

_\- The Tempest_

A man and a boy walk into the forest and only a man will walk out.

This has been written, in the stars, in destiny’s blotted book, since the day the python drew its coils tight around the cradle and its master spat his poison upon a king’s first born, the father’s crime becoming the son’s punishment.

From the smoky long ago of his mother’s hearth, the king remembers a story of little men and poisoned apples. A story of a hunter told to take a young girl into the forest and cut out her heart, so his mistress could dine on her youth and her beauty.

But it is his own heart that he needs to cut out now. Put it in a jar, place it on a high shelf in a dark room, pickle it in lemon and brine, bid it not to beat.

Scott walks three steps ahead of him, his head held neither high nor low, but focused on the path in front of him. He never looks behind him.

They say his first born son grows more like him every day. He sees it in the straightness of his back and the set of his jaw, in the flashes of temper, in the bright confidence that gives way suddenly to doubt, like a yawning crack in black ice. He sees it in his wit and his frustration that the world is as it is and not as it ought to be.  

But that wilfulness, that pigheaded foolish courage, is all his mother. And her kindness is in him too. And behind the bluster and the bravado and the squalls of sullen sulkiness some of her wisdom must lurk. When Geoff calls his name, he does not fight or run or ask where they are going, but simply says, “It’s time, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s time.”  

He remembers how the midwives clucked when he arrived at the door of the tower room. Men, let alone kings, had no business knowing the secrets of the birthing room. He remembers how Lucy, sweaty, sore, _glowing_ Lucy had shooed them out with a wave of her hand and beckoned him over to see the thing – the shrieking, howling, red faced, blue eyed thing – that they had made together. He remembers a tiny fist clasped tight around his finger.

_Harden your heart. Make it as stone. Tear it from your chest and lock it away under bolt and key._

“That’s far enough.” This is the oldest part of the forest. Light falls between the trees as rich and soft as velvet. The moss is dense underfoot and the canopy puts any of man’s cathedrals to shame. “We will not be disturbed here.”

Scott stops, glances back, nods absently. His hand snakes around his chest, as if he doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

“Scott.”

“Oh.” The boy looks about him, uneasy. “We – we will not be disturbed here.”

“Good.”

A shaft of light falls on Scott’s face, turns his eyes, always so queer and striking, the colour of a summer storm. His body is drawn taut as a bowstring. His fists are clenched tight. In him Geoff sees the babe he once was, the man he will never get to see.

_Cold as the frost, hard as a stone.  
_

Do you understand what must be done?”

The boy nods.

“Do you understand why?”

The boy nods again.

“Can’t you speak?”

The boy shakes his head once, emphatically, bites his lower lip hard, stubborn as his mother.

“Don’t be afraid. I promise it will be quick.”

Scott nods.

His father draws his sword.

He is a king and a king must put his people first. He is a father and a father must protect his children. Gordon and Alan are yet unharmed. John might still be saved. Virgil will have to be heir now. He will hate it, but he will grow into it in time. A king has a duty. This is his duty.

He lifts his sword, the sword he has honed until the air hums around it. Today it will earn a new name, its last name. He will call it _A Father’s Sin_.

“Kneel, boy.”

Scott kneels upon the ragged earth. “Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Will this end the curse?”

He wishes he could lie, wishes he could give him even that much. “I don’t know, Scott.”

“When you tell them I am gone, what will you say?”

Now it is the king’s turn to be unable to speak.

Scott looks up at him, and speaks in plea, not command. “Can you tell them that a beast came from the woods? Can you tell them it snatched me, snapped my neck, that I fought? Can you tell them I was brave? Will you lie, Papa, please?”

“Bow your head, Scott.”

There will be no pain, no unsightly bludgeoning, just a whisper and a stroke to make an end to it. Merciful.

_Do it and be done. Be done.  
_

“Papa,” the boy’s hands tremble as they press into the moss, but he doesn’t cry.

_Cut out your heart.  
_

“It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be brave.” _  
_

_You are braver than I ever could have hoped._

He raises his sword.

_Make it stone.  
_

And swings it down.

“Stop!” And in that moment every muscle in his body freezes with a force so strong that it feels like he might rip himself apart.

“I’m sorry,” Scott shuffles to his feet. _Thunderbringer_ has sliced the palm of his hand, outstretched, and has gone no further, can go no further. A pearl of blood slides down the blade. “I’m sorry.”

“Scott,” the word is a wheeze whispered between frozen lips.

“Sorry. Sorry. Not yet. Not yet.”

And Geoff watches, waits for the boy to turn and run, to disappear into the forest or to bind him with some geas from which there is no escape, but instead he just says in a thoughtful deliberate way, reminiscent more of his younger brothers than of himself. “My death will end the curse.” He tries to smile up at his father. “And John will be free and Alan, Gordon and Virgil will be safe and my family will live happily ever after. My death will end the curse.”

He bows his head again. “Okay.” And the binding grip that has a hold on Geoff fades. “I’m ready, Papa.”

The king nods.

_He will feel no pain. You must feel nothing at all.  
_

The sword drops.

And falls to the ground.

The king drops to his knees beside it and pulls his trembling son into his arms.

 

***

 

A king searches for another way.

He writes out the words carefully on a scrap of paper and gives them to his son.

“You will… you will…” Scott stops. He is pale as the parchment. “Papa, I do not want to read this.”

“I know. But you will. And you must.”

Scott digs at his eyes with the heel of his hand and says again, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. But you must go on.”

“‘You will leave this place. You will travel with the speed of the east wind. No man or woman will… will… please, Papa, don’t make me do this.”

He kneels then and wipes the boy’s streaked face with his thumbs.  “It’s alright. You’re alright.”

The boy shakes his head. “Who will be king if you are not? Who will protect the kingdom and my brothers?”

“You will.”

“I can’t. I… I am what they need protecting from. I’m a _monster_.”

And in that moment he knows the foolishness of trying to cut your heart out, because he feels it is being ripped from his chest, such is his horror and his fear. “Scott, your tongue, mind your tongue.”

But if he fears that the boy will grow claws and fangs, that his skin will split and turn to horn, then his fears are wasted, because nothing happens. The boy only shrugs and says, “I cannot make true what is already so.”

“Scott…”

“You should strike my head off.”

“I said I’m not going to do that. That was… it was foolishness.”

“I killed our mother.” It is less than a whisper.

Geoff strokes his face and presses his own brow to Scott’s. “I know. I’ve known for a long time.”

Since the day John lay dying in the library. Since the day Scott came and found him in his quarters, hollowed out and grieving. The boy had ripped the curtains back so the pale morning sun pierced the gloom like a thousand knives. “You’ve got to come.”

“Later, Scott, later. Leave my… leave me be.” He had reached again for the cup of wine.

“Papa, you’ve got to come _now_!”

And he had found himself up and walking and propelled by a will that was not his own and Scott had dragged him all the way to the library, where John sat, pale and shaking, huddled under the sunburst blanket that Lucy had crocheted Scott when he was a baby, a little light like a firefly sitting on the crown of his head.  He remembers the story they had told and how he had finally understood how Lucy, his brave, spitfire, indomitable princess, had at last given up the fight.

How many nights has it been since then, poring over old books and scrolls? How many days spent combing his kingdom for someone to help his sons? How many purses wasted on magicians and charlatans? How many stories and rumours and lies has he chased down in search of an answer?

“And John. I’m killing John too,” Scott whispers.

And that’s not a lie either. His second son is a guttering candle flame, a moth beating broken wings against the window. Every year there is less and less of that bright, curious little boy that would drag his father to the battlements to count the stars. A weary, greying, vacant soul has taken his place, who sighs when he brings him a book or tries to draw him back into the workings of the kingdom and says, “I’m tired, Papa. Can we do this another time?”

“He thinks I can’t see it,” Scott tugs at a blade of grass, snaps it. “But I can. I can and I can’t do anything to save him. I _tried_. I tried to tell him. But the words just slide off him like water. He looks at me like I’m mad or like I _bore_ him and says, ‘what are you bothering me with this time? Can’t you go and play in your own room and leave me in peace.’ And it’s all because I said… I said it aloud, ‘John must never know.’ That’s what I said. I doomed him.”

“You were a boy. You were scared.”

“No. I was ashamed and a coward.” He tears strips off the blade of grass. His shoulders shake.

“Shh. It’s alright.”

But the boy shakes his head vehemently. “It’s not. It can’t be.”

“Scott.”

“No!”

Suddenly Scott’s head comes up and there’s a flicker of life in his eyes. “I could make you do it. Then it wouldn’t be your fault. You wouldn’t even have to feel sad if I told you not to be.”

“No.”

“Why not?!” Scott spins away from him, pacing up and down, suddenly petulant again. “That’s brave isn’t it? A prince should be brave. That’s what you taught me. A prince should be brave and good and put his people first.”

Geoff seizes his arm and pulls him back, roughly, so the boy can’t pull away.

“You know why, don’t you?”

“No. I – ”

“Yes you do!”

“ _I don’t_!”

“What’s the reason then, that you’ve never told John he must forgive you?” Scott tries to get free, but he holds tight. “All those years, all those battles, all that silence, why have you never told John he must forgive you for what you did?”

Scott squirms and his eyes fall on the hilt of his father’s sword and seem stuck there. “He says it’s not my fault. He says…”

“I know what he says. Why haven’t you done it?”

“I want to,” he says. “Every night before I go to sleep I think about it. How I could climb up the tower steps and push open the door to the library. How John would be asleep on that stupid, sooty rug by the hearth with a book beside him, and how the fire would be banked low, and how I could just sneak up and whisper in his ear, “You are happy in the library. You are safe here. You’re not sad or afraid. This is all you’ve ever wanted from life. And when you wake in the morning we will be best friends again, and things between us will be just as they were.’ Papa, you’re hurting me.”

Geoff’s hand is fastened vice tight around Scott’s arm, but he does not let go.

“And why don’t you? It would be so easy to do that, wouldn’t it? Nobody could stop you. Scott, nobody can ever stop you.”

“I should,” said Scott, “Wouldn’t it take his pain away? Wouldn’t it help him? Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

“Then why haven’t you?”

“B-because I can’t. I know I should but _I can’t_. Because if I do that to him, he won’t be John anymore, and I’d rather he hated me as John than loved me and was just a _thing_.” Plump tears stream down nose and plop into the moss. He bats at his face like he could beat them away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Geoff pulls him to him just he did when he was a babe, this boy who is as slender as a stripling and growing just as fast, and who shakes just like a young tree would, caught in a gale. “Listen to me, Scott. You are good and kind and brave. You are stronger than the temptations that will surround you. You must hold onto this. You are loved. You are loved not because it is your command but because of who you are. By your brothers, by your mother, by me. Remember that if you can do nothing else.”

And his son, to his credit, tries to smile. “I wish it were your words that could make truth of a lie.”

“Oh, son.”

Scott rests his forehead against Geoff's shoulder. He can feel his breaths, sharp and shallow, like a frightened horse. “Papa, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want you to leave. I can’t do this without you. We can’t –”

Geoff seperates himself from the boy, so he can look him straight in the eye and he can feel Scott shrink away a little. “Listen to me, Scott. We, all of us, dance in the Magician’s hand. As king of Melchior I cannot act against him, but if he thinks that he has won maybe there is a chance that we can outsmart him. But only if no one knows where I am. Only if you are brave enough to do this.”

“But Papa…”

“He won’t just come for me, or for you. He will not stop until he has destroyed your brothers too. You need to finish what you started. Can you do that? If not for me then for your brothers?”

The boy takes a moment. Then he nods.

The paper is smudged and blotted. He has to hold it close to read it.

‘You will leave this place. You will travel with the speed of the east wind. No man or woman will know your face or mark your passage, but all will aid you on your quest. You will find a way to end my curse and defeat the Magician. You are banished from your home… please, Papa…”

_Harden your heart.  
_

“Go on.”

“Until the curse is lifted or… or until there are no more stars in the sky.  Until the moon no longer lights the sea. And when I have read these words I will… I will sleep and I w-will dream sweet dreams. And when I awake I will - will have no memory of this meeting.”

Done, he crumples the paper tight in his fist and tries to speak. But the wave of sleep comes on him before he can. His eyelids sag and he falls forward. His father catches him, and for the last time, King Geoff holds his firstborn son.

He places the boy upon the mossy bank, the same one where he first kissed his true love, he brushes his hair back from his face and teases the paper from his hand. He kisses his son on the brow, a father’s blessing his only weapon against a magician’s curse.

Then he strides through the trees and does not look back, and does not see the little boy slide down from the tree and creep into the clearing.


	11. Epilogue - The Tale of the Horse with Stars for Eyes

A prince sleeps on a mossy bank…

And wakes with the dawn.

He rubs sleep-frosted eyes and stretches cold and stiff limbs and sees his little brother sitting at his feet, blue and trembling with the cold.

In a moment he has slipped his cloak from his shoulders and pulled it tight around his little brother, warming his hands with his own bigger ones to warm them up. “Alan, you’re freezing. What are you doing out here? Do you want to catch your death of cold?”

“You were sleeping,” says the little boy. “I couldn’t wake you.”

And Scott smiles suddenly and says, “I dreamt I was a knight and rode a great silver horse, and when the kingdom was in need we flew together on steel wings to right all wrongs.”

“Wow,” says the smallest prince, “I would like to ride a horse like that.”

Scott laughs and says, “You were there too, we all were. In my dream you rode a horse of red fire, with stars for eyes and you flew faster and higher than all others. When the heavens needed a champion they called on you.”

“They did? Really?”

“Really.”

Alan sighs at the thought of his fiery stallion, and of his brothers riding with him on horses of light and air and strange magic. And suddenly all the terrors of the night, all the things he saw, all the things he heard, seem far away.

“Hey,” says Scott. “We should have a feast, just like we used to. We’ll bring Virgil and Gordon and all the food we can steal and sneak up to the library and surprise John, and the five of us can break our fast together by the fire. What do you think?”

Alan nods.

And he knows, just knows, that everything is alright, And that when they walk home Papa will be eating breakfast by the hearth in the hall, and wanting to know where they have been all night. And then they will all go to the library together and eat breakfast, and maybe Scott will say something that makes John roll his eyes, or John will say something that makes Scott laugh, or Gordon will stick two boiled eggs in his mouth and chase him around, pretending to be a lungfish, or Virgil will call them all idiots.

And he will know again for certain that to have four favourite brothers means he is the luckiest prince in the world.

But then he looks up and sees the stars that hang in Scott’s eyes.

He presses his forehead against Scott’s chest. “Scott, it’ll be alright. Don’t cry. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect you this time.”

And his brother reaches out and ruffles his hair. “I know you will, Allie.”

And though there is a pain in his heart that he cannot name, and tears in his eyes that will never fall, Prince Scott smiles. “But why would I cry? It was a happy dream.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story got away from me a little, in that once I started I just couldn't stop. 
> 
> I'm a little bit proud of it, and a little bit sad that it exists in such a small corner of the fandom that it's unlikely to be well read, so kudos to you for getting this far!
> 
> My thanks must again go out to carryonstarkid for allowing me to play in her sandbox and PreludeinZ for making such interesting castles in it. 
> 
> Also my thanks to Mr Bill Shakespeare. Who would have thought a play about a meglomaniac duke living on a small island with his kid and adopted kid would offer such a rich, fertile ground for Thunderbird?
> 
> And thanks to you for reading
> 
> Swallow  
> Feb, 2016


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